Servants of the Dynasty does something no other study has done
before: the fifteen original essays commissioned for this project
provide the First comparative examination of the lives of women in royal
courts in a genuinely world-historical context. In doing so, editor Anne
Walthall and her contributors offer important insights to two subjects
of history often kept entirely separate: the history of monarchy, and
the history of women. Recognizing that scholars from both camps may
question the need for this study, Walthall pointedly asks in the
introduction: "What can a study of palace women bring to our
understanding of how different monarchies functioned?" and
"What can a study of palace women bring to our understanding of
what women did in the past?" (18, 20). These are good questions.
Monarchies and royal courts have nearly always been configured around
the maintenance of masculine power and authority (one fact this
collection makes abundantly clear is that ruling queens, empresses,
sultanas, begums, or any other title you can name are astonishingly
uncommon historically all around the world). When royal women and other
female palace inhabitants have received historians' attention, they
have most often been situated in a biographical context, and often as
not with a romantic or salacious bent. This tendency is especially
evident within the evergreen genre of biographies about the queens and
royal mistresses of France and England. (2) Although readers
anticipating another set of romantic or voyeuristic biographies will be
coming to the wrong book, I doubt they will leave disappointed. This
study is a compelling read of an entirely different sort: each chapter
opens new vistas into the lived realities of palace women across the
globe at all social levels, from the expected consorts, concubines, and
royal mistresses, down to the lowest levels of relations and servants;
there are even detours--some of them surprising--into female
opportunities to become economic entrepreneurs and armed soldiers.

Servants of the Dynasty originated at two conferences on world
historical studies concerned respectively with gender and palace women,
hosted by the University of California campuses at Davis and Irvine. The
resulting volume presents work by the some of the conference
participants, framed by an opening essay from Walthall titled
"Introducing Palace Women." Here she usefully lays out the
historical and scholarly issues surrounding the study of palace women.
Yet unlike most introductions to a set of collected essays by multiple
authors, Walthall does not provide a clear rationale for how to proceed
intellectually through the rest of the book. The following fifteen
chapters do not seem organized by any discernable logic: they are
neither divided into topical "parts", nor is there an obvious
chronological or geographical progression. For example, a chapter on
twentieth-century Benin is followed by one on the Chinese Qing dynasty
(1644-1911), which in turn is followed successively by a chapter on the
sixteenth-century Russian ruling family of Ivan IV, and a chapter on the
Shogun's palace in nineteenth-century Japan. Two chapters on the
royal French household (the first pre-revolutionary, the second post-)
are inexplicably separated by four chapters on Mexico, Nigeria, China,
and Korea. Similarly, there are two chapters on Nigeria, but they
address different ethnolinguistic groups (Benin and Hausa), and to add
to the confusion, the chapter on modern Benin is followed (albeit six
chapters later) by the chapter on early modern Hausaland.

This is not a book, therefore, for historical neophytes: other than
the first chapter, one should look elsewhere for a clearer introduction
to the history of women and monarchy. Indeed, the essays are not all
necessarily based on historical scholarship; several are clearly more
archeological and/or anthropological m methodology than strictly
historical in the traditional sense of depending for evidence on written
primary sources. The lack of organization also encourages random
reading: one can more easily dip in and out of chapters according to the
dictates of interest, than read the book straight through. In fact that
may be the preferred way to approach such a diverse collection of
essays: follow one's own interests, and see where one winds up.
Happily, a curiosity is quickly instilled in the reader to compare
different palace women's situations and life opportunities, which
should eventually draw one through the whole set of essays. Regardless
of reading method, much is to be gamed from the wealth of ideas and
material contained m this volume.

The possibility of women exercising masculine-style power and
kingly authority has historically inspired cascades of criticism by
social commentators, usually male, around the world. In their eyes,
"women, it is assumed, do not know how to use power; they play
favorites, corrupt officials if not the king, squander the state's
financial resources, and lack the courage to resist enemies" (8-9).
The problem stems m part from the palace environment itself: in a
setting devoted to maintaining the ruler's masculine authority,
women's reproductive powers were required in order to pass that
authority on to the next generation. But in many parts of the world
their productive powers were greatly feared as potentially corrupting if
applied to much beyond the maternal realm, and many efforts were made to
divorce women from access to political authority. Famously, many Asian
palaces included distinctly separate quarters for women, naturally a
subject of intense interest m the present volume (32-37, 84-90, 96-100,
172-178, 262-268). Where important women were not physically removed
from access to men, they could be contained using other means. In
France, one of the world cultures historically most frightened of female
power, between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries queens were
gradually divested of any duties other than providing the country with a
male heir to the throne; eventually they were not even officially
crowned (300). In response to all these precautions, Walthall wryly
notes "there is much more to politics than making policy" (9).
Questions of succession, ministerial appointments, and many other
aspects of rule were open to influence by anyone close to the monarch.
Who could be closer than his mother, wife, or bed-partner? This
uncomfortable truth was itself the subject of repeated feminist
critiques m the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the myth of a
dangerous backroom "empire of women" was frequently invoked by
anti-women's-rights thinkers as reason to categorically deny women
an open role in modern political voting and office-holding. (3)
Contemporary scholars have come to terms with the fact that,
historically, most palace women did indeed wield power in direct
proportion to the quality of their personal and sometimes physical
relationships with a male authority figure. This book offers a valuable
addition to that sometimes uncomfortable fact: female authority figures
also could and did create avenues to power for women who served beneath
them.

The very notion of "palace women" is alluring in part
because "the whole notion implies their remaining largely hidden
from view" (4). It is always tempting to delve into the history of
things both mysterious and forbidden. Palaces could literally hide royal
women behind walls, or enclose them within inner courtyards and
buildings, often along with the monarch and their respective male and
female attendants; the various Forbidden Cities of the Emperors of
China, or Topkapi, the Ottoman sultans' palace in Istanbul, come
immediately to mind. One of this book's delights is that we are
also introduced to lesser known examples which richly deserve to be
rescued from obscurity. The royal dwelling of the Oba of Benin, an
ancient kingdom still flourishing within modern Nigeria, is one such:
the enclosed compound was formerly decorated with "monumental ...
articulated brass castings of sinuous snakes, whose heads with toothed
jaws hung open above the entrances to main buildings" (118).
Alternatively, palaces could have physically open architecture--like
Versailles, with its large windows, countless doors, and outward
orientation toward gardens and forests, and its literal openness to all
appropriately-dressed comers--yet be located at a substantial physical
remove from centers of population, such as Paris. But not all palaces
nor all palace women were equally removed from the general population.
Royal dwellings were just as likely to be centrally located within
cities--like the royal dwellings of the ancient Maya, or the Austrian
imperial residence in Vienna--and have a kind of permeability in which
the female residents regularly made themselves visible to their subjects
while still retaining a high level of domestic seclusion.

As described earlier, the book lacks a clear organizational
structure. Yet it is possible to impose one on it through creative
reading. The most interesting approach may be one that is hinted at by
Walthall's introduction, six pages of which are devoted to
analyzing the relative power of women according to their categorization
within palace society (11-17). The three female roles most often
considered in histories of monarchy and palace life--married and
unmarried sexual partners, and mothers of rulers--had predictable
degrees of access to power. Royal wives seldom had much, but royal
mothers who survived to see their son crowned often acquired great power
and sometimes even legitimate political authority, as in the case of
regents for minors or traveling rulers. The equally official role of
concubines (always in the plural, and found virtually everywhere outside
of Europe, where monogamous Christian monarchs were expected to content
themselves sexually with a serial string of unofficial mistresses)
varied from weak to strong depending upon the differing cultural
expectations placed on them, their ability to produce children, and
their ability to emotionally captivate the ruler and/or guide a son into
position as the next heir to the throne.

There is also another category of palace women which, tellingly, is
highlighted in the book's title: servants. On one level, all women
(and all men other than the ruler) were "servants of the
dynasty": everyone below the level of the monarch himself (with the
possible exception of royal wives and the mothers of royal children)
were technically there to serve the ruling system. More prosaically,
every palace depended for its daily maintenance to a greater or lesser
extent on a female workforce. All too often, these women have been
overlooked by historians even though, as this volume's authors make
clear, with some creative strategies historical records can be
identified which detail their duties, their compensation, and even their
personal lives. Although not every chapter is concerned with palace
servants, they appear repeatedly in the book, and are the specific
subject of some of the most compelling chapters. For example, one
historian draws upon a preserved cache of personal letters to tell the
life story of their author, Fujinami, a low-level female messenger
employed in the Great Interior of the Japanese shogun's palace in
the early nineteenth-century (172-190). Another essay profits from the
comparative analysis of official and anecdotal accounts to uncover the
histories of two female entertainers, Liu and Yang, who rose through
their skills at political machination to become official consorts of the
Song emperors of medieval China (261-279). Women who entered palaces as
servants sometimes came willingly, sometimes unwillingly; often they
entered with male assistance, but in some places women inside recruited
other women (relatives or family friends, usually) from the outside.
Once installed, as the two chapters just described indicate, these women
handled a surprising range of duties well beyond the expected female
drudgery of cleaning, cooking, and tending the royal family: they might
instead serve as messengers or entertainers, but also were employed in
work as diverse as textile-producers, bookkeepers, guards, and even
armed soldiers. Palace employment could bring with it an education,
social advancement, and financial enrichment, among other advantages
over life on the outside.

Returning to the pair of questions which drive this book, let us
consider again "what can a study of palace women bring to our
understanding of how different monarchies functioned?" (18).
Monarchies depended upon the women in their palaces to do far more than
provide the next generation of rulers, or to be sexual partners for
royal men. Women, like men, were used by rulers to forge royal identity
and provide quantifiable evidence of power; too often the roles women
played in the demonstration of kingly power have been ignored by
historians of monarchy. Likewise, "what can a study of palace women
bring to our understanding of what women did in the past.'?"
(20). As in any complex household or society, women were woven
throughout the social fabric of palace life. Women who entered palace
society were not mere pawns of the monarch. They had their own
ambitions, which sometimes played out with much less reference to the
chief figure of power than one might expect; the example of the Japanese
messenger Fujinami, mentioned above, is a perfect case study of such a
woman. Walthall sums it up best: "Insofar as palace women
participated in political integration not only by linking elite families
but also by bringing a variety of social classes onto a common ground,
they played a crucial if often overlooked role in the construction of
the premodern polity.... Although royal courts were designed to project
the authority of male rulers, they maintained themselves through the
reproductive and productive activities of women" (20).

In regard to the book's utility in the classroom, it is
probably best mined for individual essays to suit a given course, unless
the course is devoted to a world-historical approach to the topic of
women, power, and politics. By not clustering the chapters according to
global region, the experience of female palace inhabitants in Europe and
India, Mexico and Africa, the Near East and the Far East are truly
positioned comparatively. Taken all together, the essays gathered in
this collection offer a careful and wonderful global-historical approach
to the topic of palace women.

Reviewed by Julia Landweber (1)

(1) Julia Landweber is an Assistant Professor of History and
Women's Studies at Montclair State University.

(2) See the many books by Antonia Fraser, such as her recent Love
and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 2006); see also Nancy Mitford's classic, Madame de
Pompadour (New York: NYRB Classics reprint edition, 2001); other recent
entrants include Eleanor Herman, Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery,
Power, Rivalry, and Revenge (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), and
Kelly Hart, The Mistresses of Henry VIII (Stroud: History Press, 2009).

(3) Examples include Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet,
"Condorcet's Plea for the Citizenship of Women" (orig.
published in French, 1790), and Olympe de Gouges, "The Rights of
Women" (orig. published in French, 1791); and also John Stuart
Mill, "Speech before the House of Commons" (orig. published
1867); all three are reprinted in Susan G. Bell and Karen M. Often,
Women the Family, and Freedom: Volume One, 1750-1880 (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1983), pp. 101,107, and 485, respectively.